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Chapter Eleven

Anastasia

Iwake up warm.

The kind of warmth that seeps into your bones, so encompassing that for a few fleeting seconds, I let myself sink into it. A slow inhale. The scent of him—something rich and woodsy, clean skin, and a hint of whatever expensive detergent his sheets are washed in—wraps around me. My cheek is pressed against solid heat, my legs tangled in a mess of crisp white linen and corded muscle. It’s the second the weight of an arm tightens around my waist that reality crashes down, slamming into me with the force of a freight train.

Oh. No.

My breath hitches.

I don’t move.

If I don’t move, maybe none of this is real. Maybe if I lie here long enough, this will unravel into nothing but a dream—some twisted, frustrating fantasy conjured up by my traitorous subconscious. Because there’s no way I actually did this. No way I actually let myself⁠—

Oh my God.

Heat crawls up my neck. I squeeze my eyes shut, fighting the wave of nausea rolling through me. I was already walking a tightrope, and now? I just threw myself off of it. With no safety net. No way to recover from the sheer recklessness of what I did last night.

Did I just jeopardize my career?

The thought is ice water down my spine, chasing away the fog of sleep and warmth, replacing it with sharp, biting panic. Because what I did? What we did? It wasn’t just a lapse in judgment. It was a full-on, no-brakes, straight-off-the-cliff kind of mistake.

He’s my boss.

I work for him.

This is everything I swore I wouldn’t do.

My fingers curl into the sheets, my mind scrambling for a plan, an escape, anything that will make this feel less like the disaster I know it is. But I don’t move. Because the problem isn’t just that I slept with him.

It’s that I don’t regret it.

Not even a little bit.

The thought is suffocating.

I should go. I should untangle myself from him, slide out of this bed, and walk away before he wakes up and the full weight of what we did settles between us like an iron wall. But I don’t.

Because I don’t want to.

I’m exhausted. Bone-deep, emotionally drained, completely unraveling at the seams. And this? This is the first time in months I haven’t felt like I was standing on the edge of something, waiting for the next bad thing to knock me off balance.

Graham shifts against me, his hand sliding over the bare skin of my waist, and a traitorous shiver runs through me. I bite my lip, my heart hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat. His breathing is still slow, steady.

He’s not awake.

Yet.

I force myself to take a deep breath, to push past the war raging in my mind and make a decision. I could leave. I could slip out of bed, find my clothes, and be gone before he even has the chance to open his eyes. I could pretend this never happened.

But something in my chest clenches at the thought.

I don’t want to run.

I don’t want this to be something I have to bury under layers of professionalism and avoidance.

I want it to mean something.